Alert

Chapter 23

Home finally, and still damp from a glorious hot shower, I plopped my tired carcass down at the head of the dining room table at around 7:30 p.m.

I was clad in a pair of orange swim trunks and a Yankees number 42 Mariano Rivera jersey, which worked better than you might think as a pajamas ensemble. Actually, my atrocious getup was the only thing I could find now that the laundry was piling up at an alarming rate. I was down to the bottom of the drawer and would be staying there, no doubt, for the time being.

My hastily put-together late dinner for la familia Bennett was French toast, one of my go-to dishes. I’d offered to get pizza again, but the kids were pizzaed out and demanded a home-cooked meal. They had probably meant a home-cooked dinner, but too bad for them — they hadn’t specified. They seemed to enjoy it well enough, or at least they enjoyed my wise heavy-handedness with the confectioners’ sugar.

I was relishing my French cuisine with a bottle of Guinness, the only adult beverage left in the house. Like the laundry, the whole grocery thing was something I had to work out, since Mary Catherine was still away.

Speaking of Mary Catherine, I’d been jazzed to find a letter — an actual paper snail-mail letter — from her on the hall table when I’d come in. The good news was that there was a new lead on a buyer for the hotel. No definite offer as of yet, but things were looking good.

The bad news was that though she had asked about the kids, there was really nothing about us or our fabulous romantic week together on the windswept Cliffs of Moher. Or about her heart-wrenching note, which I had read on the plane.

What could that mean? I wondered. Cold feet? Buyer’s remorse? I didn’t know. All I knew was that I wanted her back here with me so hard it was starting to hurt.

But like I said, at least I was home. Finally clean and warm and home, though I wasn’t in a real talkative mood after my truly insane day. I was more than content to just listen to the dull roar of the kids all around the table, talking and giggling. Even their teasing was comforting. Their normalcy, their obliviousness to the horror of today’s events, was just what the doctor ordered.

I was still sitting in my family’s warm chaos, mopping up the stout and syrup, when Seamus came in at speed through the apartment’s front door.

“Long day, eh, Mick?” said Seamus, looking a little flustered when he spotted me.

“About a week long, Father,” I said. “Make that a month, but I can’t talk about it. I refuse to, in fact. Pull up a chair and a plate. How’s the nanny hunt going?”

After Seamus’s health scare, and down one Mary Catherine, I thought it best to look for some temporary help.

“Been on it since this morning,” Seamus said. “That’s why I’m here. I think I might have found someone. He was recommended quite highly by a friend down at the archdiocese office.”

“He?” I said.

“Yeah. He’s a bit... well, unconventional, you might say.”

“Unconventional? How so?” I asked as the doorbell rang.

“See for yourself,” Seamus said, blinking at me. “That’s him now.”

Chapter 24

Oh, I see, I thought when I went out into the hall and opened the door.

The young man was tall and Colin Farrell handsome, with spiky black hair and black Clark Kent glasses. Nineteen, maybe twenty. He was wearing a white-and-green tracksuit.

“Hello, there,” he said with an infectious smile and an Irish accent. “I’m Martin Gilroy. Father Romans sent me here about a job?”

“This way,” Seamus said, ushering him in before I could open my mouth.

The ruckus in the dining room ceased immediately as Seamus and I brought him into the living room. The kids stared at him in dead silence as we walked past.

“Hello, guys,” Martin said, smiling.

If he was fazed by the ten sets of wide eyes on him, he hid it well. He actually stopped and craned his neck to look in the doorway.

“Hey, what are ya having in there? French toast, is it? Breakfast for dinner?”

He crouched down next to Shawna and made a funny face. “Then what’s for breakfast, I wonder? Let me guess. Steak and green beans and mashed potatoes?”

I smiled along with the kids. This guy was pretty good. I was starting to like him already.

“So tell us a little something about yourself, Martin,” I said as we sat on the couch.

“Not much to tell, really,” he said, crossing a big neon-green Nike on his thigh. “Me home is a little town in County Cavan, Ireland, called Kilnaleck. Eight of us in the family, not including Mom and Da. Got out of farm chores by playing football, or soccer, as you lot call it, for what reason I’ll never know.

“Anyway, I got good enough at it to get a scholarship to Manhattan College. I’m also on the track team. Trying to get a mechanical engineering degree on the side, as I thought it might be good to have a backup plan if my dreams of becoming Beckham don’t turn out. I don’t drink, so that hampers the ol’ social life a bit at school. I like kids and staying busy, and, um, I could use the money.”

“Any experience?” I said.

“Plenty, since I was one of the oldest in my family. No one died on me. I also worked at the town camp since I was sixteen, so I got all my first aid stuff and all that.”

“Do you cook?” Seamus asked.

“Oh, sure. Breakfast, lunch, dinner,” he smiled. “All at the right times, too, if you want. Only kidding. Nothing fancy, but I can keep kids fed.”

“You know how to do laundry?” I said.

He took off his glasses and polished them on the edge of his track jacket.

“I can iron a crease in a pair of trousers you could shave with,” he said as he slipped the glasses back on. “Actually, that’s not true. I read that somewhere. But I’ve done laundry before. Separate the whites and the colors or something, right? Hell, I’ll do the windows, if ya want. Improvise and overcome, that’s me motto. Bring it on.”

“Martin, there’s ten kids out there. Ten,” I said. “What would you do with them? What would be your strategy?”

“There’s a park around here, right? Riverside, is it? Well, weather permitting, after their homework and whatnot, I’d keep ’em out there, run ’em around, like we do at camp. Get ’em tired, wear ’em down, and then dinner and off to bed while I hit the chores.”

I smiled. I didn’t like this kid. I loved him.

“When can you start?”

Martin shrugged and smiled again.

“I don’t know. When can I start?”

“Tomorrow? Say, six a.m.?” I said.

“See ya then,” he said as he stood up.

“Just a second,” I said as I saw him off at the door. “The trains are out. How’d you get here from the Bronx?”

He zipped up his track jacket.

“I ran,” he said.

“You ran here from the Bronx?”

He nodded.

“And now I’m going to run back. Got to keep in tip-top for track. Why?”

It was my turn to smile.

“No reason, Martin,” I said. “See you tomorrow.”

Chapter 25

It was dark and nasty and raining cats and dogs the next morning. The dim, dreary, churning East River beneath the Brooklyn Bridge looked about as scenic and lovely as a field of freshly poured cement as I crossed over it in my department Impala, heading to work.

Even so, my day had started at top speed. Martin Gilroy hadn’t been on time. He’d been early. All the kids seemed excited to see him, especially the older girls, who seemed particularly ready and mysteriously dolled up to go to school.

Seamus had stayed over and was on hand as well to show Martin the ropes. The lovely old codger was looking pretty good, too, I thought, after all he’d been through. Pink and healthy and cheerful. Back in form.

I was pleased. All men are mortal, and Seamus, at eighty-plus, was more mortal than most, I knew, but I doggedly refused to think he was ever going anywhere except to say Mass.

On the other side of the bridge, I found the first exit for DUMBO and took it. My trip to the hipster-paradise neighborhood of Down Under Manhattan Bridge Overpass wasn’t because of a burning desire for an ironic beer T-shirt but a work location shift. With all the media hoopla over the mayor’s assassination, case headquarters had been changed from the Thirty-Third Precinct to the NYPD’s discreet new Intelligence Division building in Brooklyn.

On a dark, narrow cobblestoned street just off the river, I parked in front of the large nondescript old brick building that I’d been to only twice before. I shielded my way past three armed-to-the-teeth SWAT cops manning the plain, dingy lobby and then two more stationed at a stainless steel console in the hall on the second floor.

On the other side of the security checkpoint, through a metal door, the transformation from the nineteenth-century brickwork outside to the twenty-first-century high-tech office inside became complete. There were sleek glass fishbowl offices and flat screens everywhere. Clocks on the wall gave the times of cities around the world. A lot of federal Homeland Security money was on full display.

The office was also packed with cops — dozens of detectives in polo shirts and suits. The way everyone was running around with serious expressions on their faces reminded me of an army on the muster. A tired one that just got its ass handed to it and was trying to figure out what to do next.

“Hey,” I said to Doyle as he came out of the men’s room.

“Mike, hey,” he said, leading me toward a crowded conference room at the end of the hall. “C’mon, we’re all down here about to have a briefing.”

“What’s going on?” I said.

“No one told you?” he said.

I shook my head.

“Brooklyn and Robertson scored some footage of what looks like the bombers from both of the bombing locations. They’re about to show it right now.”

Chapter 26

A tired-looking Arturo put a coffee in my hand as they dimmed the lights and put the first video up on the smart-board.

On the screen appeared a large industrial-style truck — almost like a garbage truck — with Con Edison markings on the cab door. It stopped in the middle of Saint Nicholas Avenue near 181st, and two men got out of it and popped the manhole cover.

It was hard to see them, unfortunately. It was dark, and they wore dark coveralls and Con Ed hard hats with the peaks pulled down low over their eyes, which were covered with sunglasses. Both were medium to tall in height, five ten to six feet; both were pale Caucasians. One had a dark goatee; the other a white one. The guy with the dark goatee was running the show. He had a clipboard and seemed to be barking orders as the other guy drew a huge air hose — like thing from the back of the truck and climbed down into the manhole with it.

“The truck is a vacuum truck,” said Brooklyn, who was running the smartboard for the stunned-silent room of cops. “It’s used for cleaning manholes and sewers. Engineers at Con Ed say it can easily be modified to become a large pump.”

Brooklyn showed the next video, which was of a much better, less grainy quality. Another pump truck with Con Edison markings was visible out in the street by the 168th Street subway entrance with two men behind it. The same white-goateed guy was there, but the other guy was different; on the short side, tan, no facial hair, a little pudgy. The pudgy guy got into the hole with the pump this time while the older man waited by the manhole up top.

None of the guys had any distinguishing marks that we could really see. No tattoos or birthmarks or buck teeth. Was that on purpose? I wondered. It seemed like it. It seemed like these guys were going out of their way to be nondescript.

“Is that the same truck?” a cop behind me called out.

“No,” Brooklyn said. “There were two of them. We found both on a deserted stretch of the Harlem River Drive near the Macombs Dam Bridge early this morning. No tags; their cabs were burned to a crisp. We’re still trying to trace down where they might be from through their manufacturer. The good news is that the FBI lab people found traces of the material they pumped into the tunnel in the backs of the trucks. It was powdered aluminum.”

“Powdered what?” said someone else near the front of the room.

“Powdered aluminum,” Brooklyn said. “It’s the main ingredient in flash powder, the stuff they make fireworks out of. We’re still trying to track down where you could get your hands on such a massive amount. It’s not easy, because it has many industrial uses. Apparently they make lithium ion batteries out of it.”

“Unbelievable,” I said, gaping at the screen. “So you’re saying these three guys got all this expensive industrial equipment together and then just up and went ahead and stuffed that train tunnel with gunpowder like it was a huge firecracker?”

Brooklyn nodded slowly, a solemn expression on her face as she stared with me at the white-goateed man, whose image was paused on the screen.

“And then they set it off,” she said.

Everyone turned from the screen as Lieutenant Bryce Miller came in, clutching some photocopies.

“Attention, everybody. This just came from the State Department. We sent the mayor’s shooter’s prints to the feds, and they just ID’d him.

“His name is Alex Mirzoyan. He was born in Armenia, came here when he was eleven, lives in Sunny Isles Beach in south Florida. We don’t want to jump to conclusions too quickly, but Sunny Isles Beach is where a lot of the Miami Russian Mafia live. He has the priors of a low-level criminal: credit card fraud, some burglaries, drug possession. But what’s concerning is that last year he traveled to Armenia and stayed there for six months.”

“Armenia? Is that near Russia?” said Arturo.

“Sort of,” I said. “It’s more toward the Middle East. I think it actually borders Iran.”

The room absorbed that in stunned silence.

“The Middle East? Iran?” said Brooklyn. “So we’re thinking terrorism? All this is Islamic terrorism?”

“Now, wait. Slow down,” I said. “We don’t know that. Terrorists take credit, usually, and there’s been nothing but silence, right? Plus we don’t even know if the two things are related yet. The assassination could have been a crime of sick opportunity. Like that nut who sent ricin-laced letters to politicians after nine eleven. We have to treat them as two separate crimes until further notice.”

There were some tentative nods, but even I was unsure about what I’d just said.

Like everybody else, I was freaking out and had no idea whatsoever what the hell was going on.

Chapter 27

On the eastern edge of the well-heeled Upper East Side in Manhattan, the crowded and busy neighborhood of Yorkville runs from 59th Street to 96th Street between Lexington Avenue and the East River.

Before 9/11, the neighborhood was the site of the largest disaster in New York City’s history: in 1904, just offshore of Ninetieth Street in the East River, the steamship General Slocum accidentally caught fire and sank, killing more than one thousand passengers.

And now, at exactly 8:15 a.m., Yorkville’s dark history began to repeat itself as a mechanical coughing started up in the two metal boxes that had been illegally positioned the day before at 421 East 81st and 401 East 66th.

The coughing, followed by a revving sound, came from small but quite powerful modified gasoline-powered generators contained inside each device’s metal housing. As the engine rose in pitch, the generator drove its steadily increasing electrical current through a four-foot-wide tightly wound coil of copper wire that was surrounded by a copper tube of equal length. The movement of the current through the copper cylinder instantly began to build an electromagnetic field. One that mounted and mounted as the engine pitched higher and higher, like an opera singer’s crescendo.

Then the explosives packed between the devices’ wire and tubing suddenly went off, sending a massive, invisible electromagnetic pulse in all directions at the speed of light.

The volume of the detonation inside the roof-positioned devices was negligible — a loud electrical pop, like a transformer blowing. But the sudden effect was anything but negligible.

The first official sign that something was wrong was the critical-failure alarm in the busy control room of the city’s Department of Transportation. The supervisor on duty dropped the Red Bull he’d just cracked open when he looked up and saw on the big board that every traffic light from 59th to 90th Street had just gone off-line, as though someone had hit a switch.

The traffic lights weren’t the only things in Yorkville to go off-line. At Gracie Mansion and Rockefeller University and Weill Cornell Medical Center and Memorial Sloan Kettering Cancer Center and Bloomingdale’s and the moneyed Chapin and Brearley schools and every other building within a hundred square blocks, all electrical activity instantly vanished, and every computer and light and elevator immediately ceased to work. It was like the return of the Stone Age.

People screamed and went flying as a packed southbound number 4 train coming into the 86th Street station jerked to a sudden stop. The same thing happened on a smaller but no less terrifying scale as the Roosevelt Island tram car coming out of its concrete berth over Second Avenue and 59th Street slammed to a halt and swung back and forth above the traffic.

It wasn’t just the buildings. In the side streets and avenues and even on the FDR Drive, alongside the East River, the morning rush-hour commute’s cars and delivery vans and taxis and dump trucks en masse began to coast out of control and plow into each other as their engines suddenly and inexplicably failed.

As countless car accidents occurred, pedestrians halted, staring at their suddenly fried cell phones. Shop owners opened the doors of their suddenly darkened businesses and stepped out onto the sidewalks, looking around.

On the riverside jogging path just north of John Jay Park, a female NYU student stopped by the river’s railing to check what was wrong with her suddenly dead iPod. Tugging out the earbuds, she glanced up at a strange low whining sound above her.

Then she screamed and looked, dumbstruck, at the still-spinning rotor blade from a falling traffic helicopter as it missed her head by less than five feet, a split second before it crashed nose-first into the East River.

At a safe distance away, and above the electromagnetic pulse, on the sixty-fifth floor of the Courtyard hotel on Broadway and 54th Street, a man in a white bathrobe stood in the east-facing window of his room with a pair of binoculars.

Behind him came the sudden hiss and pop of radio static followed by a frantic voice. Then another. Then another.

Mr. Beckett lowered his binoculars and turned and smiled at the police-band radio on the table behind him.

The abject confusion from their latest attack was already starting, he thought.

Good.

He smiled at Mr. Joyce, who was sitting in a soft chair beside the radio, also in a white bathrobe, fastidiously clipping his toenails.

Mr. Beckett lifted the mimosa from the room-service cart at his elbow. He raised it in the direction of his friend.

“What shall we toast to, Mr. Joyce?”

“The power of the human imagination, of course, Mr. Beckett,” said Mr. Joyce as he finished his left foot and recrossed his legs and started on the right.

He shrugged.

“What else is there, after all?”

Chapter 28

After the conference ended, my team and I set up shop at a couple of desks in a far corner of the crowded, kinetic Intelligence Division bull pen.

Although it was early in the morning, everyone already seemed a little haggard. The cops around me were doing their best to hide it, but it was obvious that people were getting scared. A bombing and an assassination were insane even by New York’s standards.

An hour later, I was still on the horn with the department public relations office trying to disseminate stills of the Washington Heights bombers to the news outlets when it started.

I had just tucked the desk phone receiver under my chin when I suddenly noticed the rhythmic, low-toned, almost subliminal buzzing that had invaded the sterile white office space. When my hip vibrated, I realized that the sound was everyone’s cell phones vibrating.

But why would everyone’s phones be going off at once? I thought, hanging up my desk phone and snatching up my cell.

“Mike, did you hear?” It was Miriam Schwartz on the other end.

“No. What?” I said frantically.

“We’re getting reports of a massive blackout on the East Side of Manhattan. But it’s not just that. The cars have stopped. All the cars are in the streets. They’ve stopped working.”

“The cars have stopped?” I repeated stupidly.

“We just got nuked!” someone called out behind me.

My eyes popped wide open. That couldn’t be true. How could that be true? I thought. Yet I remembered from a late-night History channel show that one of the side effects of a nuclear bomb is frozen cars — the bomb fries all their electronics.

A strange numbness invaded my face, my brain. It was a weird sensation that I’d felt only twice before.

The day the doctor told us that my wife, Maeve, had inoperable terminal cancer.

And on the morning of September 11, 2001.

Dear God, my kids! Where are the kids? I thought as Miriam tried to tell me something. The damn bridge! I need to get over the bridge back to Manhattan, then get to Holy Name. But Brian went to school in the Bronx. I needed to figure out how I was going to get him.

“Mike! Damn it, listen to me!” Miriam said loudly. “It’s not a nuke. That’s what everybody is assuming, but it’s not true.”

I let out a breath and did my best to refocus.

“I’m listening, Miriam.”

“ESU reports on scene at the affected region state that there is no radiation being detected anywhere. Though it does look like a nonnuclear EMP-type weapon or something might have been set off. The power is out for a hundred square blocks, and New York State ISO — the organization that manages the electrical grid — said it isn’t a blackout. At eight fifteen, just bam! Everything went off in Yorkville like someone blew out a candle. The FBI’s JTTF is heading up to a staging area near the base of the Fifty-Ninth Street Bridge. I already said you’d meet up with them there.”

“On my way,” I said, and I waved at Doyle and the crew to follow me as I hit the door.

Chapter 29

It wasn’t on the radio news yet as I sped out of Brooklyn across the Manhattan Bridge. Traffic was completely screwed up from almost the moment we arrived in Manhattan. We made it only as far as 44th Street and Second Avenue, a little past the United Nations, when the traffic became literally impassable.

I pulled the car over and double-parked and stood on the unmarked’s hood and stared north to see what was going on.

And continued to stand there, frozen and silent and blinking, in the cold falling rain.

It was a sight to behold. Something right out of a disaster movie. Second Avenue was stopped dead as far as the eye could see. On the sidewalks and between the utterly still cars, people were walking south, away from the area.

There were office workers, a lot of schoolkids. The worst were the doctors and nurses in medical scrubs pushing people in wheelchairs. A frantic and confused-looking churning multitude of scared New Yorkers was heading straight toward us.

“How’s it looking, Mike?” said Robertson as he got out of the car.

“Not good,” I said, hopping down. “Get the others. We need to walk from here.”

At Second Avenue and 59th Street, two empty NYPD cruisers and an empty FDNY ambulance stood in the middle of the entrance to the 59th Street Bridge on-ramp ominously silent with their flashers on.

I was silent, too, as I stood and stared above the emergency vehicles at the red trailer-size Roosevelt Island tram car, lightless, with its window broken open, swinging back and forth in the rain like a hanging victim.

We walked east, toward the FBI staging area, along the stone base of the bridge. There were a lot of frozen empty cars in the streets and an exodus of freaked-out people heading quickly past them and us.

At First Avenue, on the other side of the bridge underpass, I could see that a city bus had sideswiped half a dozen parked cars and was turned sideways up on the sidewalk. A crushed moped appeared to be stuck under its front bumper.

“Not good,” Arturo commented.

“At all,” Doyle concurred.

The worst sight of all was a block east, on York Avenue. In the distance, in the area known as Hospital Land, a large crowd of emergency personnel beside a line of ambulances appeared to be in the process of evacuating Sloan Kettering and Weill Cornell Medical Center.

“What are they doing?” said Arturo. “Don’t they just need to get all these cars out of here so they can get in some temporary generators?”

“To power what?” said Brooklyn. “Everything is fried. This isn’t just a blackout, Lopez. Everything electronic is broken. Everything. Every water pump to flush a toilet. Every fridge and stove is going to have to be fixed or replaced. They’re going to have to evacuate the area for who knows how long.”

“You’re right,” Doyle said. “We’ve never seen anything like this.”

The FBI’s staging area turned out to be at the site of an old concrete dock and helipad jutting out into the East River almost beneath the bridge. A dozen agents, six of them in olive-drab tactical fatigues, had set up tents and tables and a gasoline-powered generator.

We’d just reached the first tent when there was a low, thumping hum, and a helicopter appeared from the fog under the 59th Street Bridge. We stopped and stared at the dark navy-blue Bell 407 with no markings as it slowed and banked and swung around and did a steady, controlled landing despite the wind.

Its rolling door snapped open, and out came four men and a woman in FBI Windbreakers carrying large kit bags. I kept looking at the copper-haired female agent as the whining helicopter lifted off again immediately and headed back the way it came.

I was either hallucinating or the woman was my old pal Emily Parker. With New York City under siege, I could have definitely been hallucinating, but it turned out I was right.

“Mike,” Emily said, giving me a grim half smile as I approached. “What’s a nice guy like you doing in a place like this?”

Chapter 30

“Here, give me a hand with these radios,” she said, pulling some out of her bag. “We’re definitely going to need them with all the cell sites fried.”

“What brings you here?” I said to Emily after I introduced her to my guys. “I thought you were back down in DC.” Emily worked there for the Bureau’s Violent Criminal Apprehension Program and lived in suburban Virginia with her daughter, Olivia.

“That’s just my luck,” Emily said. “I came up this morning on the Acela and was starting a VICAP presentation to some junior agents when the bells went off. You know the drill. Now it’s all hands on deck until further notice. With the roads blocked the way they are, they’re going to chopper the entire New York office up here from lower Manhattan if they have to.”

“Have you heard anything?” I said.

“I was about to ask you the same question. One of the agents with me, John Bellew, was on the horn with some State Department think-tank guy. The initial read is that this was caused by one or several NNEMPs.”

“The whosiwhatsits?” said Arturo.

“Nonnuclear electromagnetic pulse weapons. It’s a weapon that creates a massive electromagnetic field and then pulses it in a given area, creating an energy wave so powerful that it erases magnetic computer memories and welds closed the microscopic junctions in sensitive transistors and computer chips.”

Arturo looked befuddled. Agent Parker had that effect on people, I knew.

“That seems pretty high-tech. Who could pull this off?” asked Brooklyn.

“NNEMPs aren’t impossible to build, but it’s very difficult. You need someone with high-level technical expertise. Basically, this isn’t a homemade pipe bomb. This is the result of a highly intelligent operation that’s probably well funded.”

“Which points to terrorism — but as of now, there are no demands,” I said. “And no claim of credit. The subway explosion, the assassination, and now this. Why keep doing all this? What’s the motive?”

“The same as all terrorism,” said Emily. “To inspire fear, to cause pain and injury, and induce psychological torture. The rapidity of each act seems to be an attempt to crash the system, to overwhelm our ability to respond.”

“They’re doing a damn good job,” said Arturo.

“Is it Islamic?” asked Doyle. “Al Qaeda? Like nine eleven?”

“They’re certainly on the list, but it could be anyone. Iranians, North Koreans.”

“Hey, Mike, you hear that? Iranians again,” said Brooklyn.

“Why, what’s the Iranian link?” Emily asked.

“The mayor’s shooter is actually Armenian,” I said. “It could just be a coincidence, but he traveled home recently, and Armenia is next door to Iran.”

“Or maybe it’s some ramped-up American nut job,” said Doyle. “A smart one with a real hard-on for the people of New York City.”

We all turned as a big NYPD Harbor Unit boat suddenly roared past out of the fog on the river, heading north.

“Whoever it is,” I said, “we need to find them. Fast.”

Chapter 31

Half a mile southeast of the FBI’s staging area, the wake of the speeding sixty-foot blue-and-white NYPD Harbor Unit boat washed up a broken neon-yellow kayak paddle and a Clorox bleach bottle covered in old fishing line onto the rocky shore of southern Roosevelt Island.

Sitting in the rain on an empty bench above the island’s garbage-strewn shoreline on West Loop Road, Mr. Joyce looked at the junk and then out at the water. New York was rarely thought of as a coastal city, but it actually had 520 miles of coastline, more than Miami, LA, and San Fran combined.

His reddish goatee was gone now, and he wore his hoodie up over a Knicks ball cap and a reflective orange traffic vest over his black denim construction coat. Beside him on the bench was some construction equipment as well as a fluorescent yellow construction tripod along with a surveyor’s graduated staff.

He turned as a car pulled up. It was a big, bulky old ’76 Cadillac Calais, a two-door hardtop that was nineteen feet long with a 7.7-liter V-8 and a curb weight of more than five thousand pounds.

Mr. Joyce did not have to look at who was behind the wheel to recognize it immediately as one of Mr. Beckett’s many cars. Mr. Beckett, who was a bit of a gearhead, was obsessed with American cars, with a particular and peculiar soft spot for Cadillacs from the 1970s.

“You’re late,” said Mr. Joyce as Mr. Beckett emerged from his metallic-brown barge, putting on his own traffic vest.

“How is that possible?” Mr. Beckett said, smiling, as he extended his hands playfully. “The boss is never late.”

“Was there trouble?” Mr. Joyce said, eyeing him.

“Please,” Mr. Beckett said, knocking on the trunk. “You’re the brains, I’m the muscle. You do your part, and I’ll do mine, okay? Is it time to do our little survey?”

“Yes.”

Mr. Joyce handed him the staff and a walkie-talkie as they walked north toward the base of the 59th Street Bridge.

“So they did use the abandoned helipad, as you anticipated,” Mr. Beckett said as he gazed across the water and saw the activity on the Manhattan shore of the channel.

Mr. Joyce shrugged.

“With the streets impassable, a dock with helicopter access is the most logical place.”

Mr. Joyce stayed back near the street with the tripod while Mr. Beckett walked off a bit with the staff and stood on a patch of muddy grass near the water.

“This is one big bitch of a bridge, eh?” Mr. Beckett said over the Motorola. “How old is it? Give me the tour. I know you want to.”

“It was built in 1909,” Mr. Joyce said. “Between 1930 and 1955, in that bridge pier behind you, they actually used to have a car elevator to bring people on and off Roosevelt Island.”

“A car elevator in a bridge? That’s incredible. What an amazing city this is. It’s almost a shame bringing it to its knees.”

“Emphasis on the almost,” Mr. Joyce replied. “Move to your left.”

“If I go any more left, I’ll be swimming.”

“Okay, stay there. Don’t move.”

Instead of a construction level on the yellow tripod, there was a Nikon camera fitted with a zoom lens. For the next twenty minutes, Mr. Joyce took photographs of the police and FBI agents. It was time in their campaign for reconnaissance. Time to assess the competition, as it were. The police could hardly be called competition, especially at this point, but one never knew. The two partners couldn’t get too cocky. Besides, information was like weaponry. Better to have it and not need it than need it and not have it.

Mr. Joyce snapped a photo and sent it through Wi-Fi to the facial recognition software on his iPhone. Michael Bennett came up on the readout with an address on West End Avenue. Mr. Joyce nodded. Good to know.

“Foggy out here today,” commented Mr. Beckett when they were done and heading back for the car.

“Yes, isn’t it?” Mr. Joyce said, walking with the tripod on his shoulder like a soldier on parade. “And I have a funny feeling it’s going to get even foggier.”

“What do you think of this honey, Mr. Joyce?” said Mr. Beckett in the car as they did a broken U-turn. “Rides like a dream, doesn’t she?”

“Tell me, how many miles to the gallon does it get, Mr. Beckett?” asked Mr. Joyce.

“City or highway?” asked Mr. Beckett.

“City,” said Mr. Joyce.

“One,” said Mr. Beckett.

He stopped suddenly another hundred feet up, by an abandoned construction site. The huge car’s weight bounced low and soft in the springs.

“Well, what do you know?” Mr. Beckett said, looking around. “Opportunity knocks. Give me a hand, Mr. Joyce, and we’ll kill two birds with one stone.”

Mr. Beckett popped the trunk, and they got out. Mr. Joyce went to the back of the long car and stared down at the two NYU graduates they had hired to place the EMP devices. The young men stared back up with their empty eyes open and their hands and mouths bound in duct tape. They had multiple bullet holes in their heads.

“Would you look at this trunk, Mr. Joyce?” Mr. Beckett said proudly. “Just look at it. It’s bigger than most apartments in this city.”

“It is rather roomy,” said Mr. Joyce as he bent and lifted the first dead kid up to his shoulder and carried him to the Dumpster and dropped him in.

Chapter 32

Several hours later, Emily and the team and I were just east of East 78th Street and Cherokee Place, alongside John Jay Park.

I’d never been to the park before or even heard of it. The buildings that formed a kind of horseshoe around it were nice ones, I saw. The park and playground were empty, but I could easily see it on the weekends being packed with kids and nannies. It was an upscale leafy enclave that reminded me a little of the famous Gramercy Park.

What wasn’t looking very upscale was the silver Volvo SUV that had jumped the curb on 78th and plowed into a fire hydrant and utility box and the wrought-iron fence surrounding the park.

The Volvo was now just a crumpled mass of metal and broken glass. The air bags had all deployed, but the hydrant and a huge dislocated section of the fence had gone through the car all the way to the backseat. Everybody in the car had died in an unimaginably horrible way.

Three more dead, I thought, sickened and angry and getting angrier. I’d heard that an old woman being transported out of Sloan Kettering had gone into cardiac arrest, which made the body count at least four. I thought of all the stores we had passed in our search for the EMP devices. Block after block of owners standing there mute and devastated in front of the darkened doorways of their nail salons and dry cleaners and restaurants and grocery stores, their lives and livelihoods in tatters.

All these poor people. I suddenly felt incredibly tired. And what was more frustrating was that we couldn’t help them. We were supposed to prevent these things, protect people, save them. And we weren’t doing it. We weren’t doing a damn thing.

The search for the NNEMPs had come down to the most basic footwork — i.e., walking to every building in the devastated area and asking supers and staff if they had received any strange deliveries. We’d been doing it all day to the tune of nada progress. The needle was still hiding in the haystack. If there even was a needle.

Emily came over as I sat on the curb by the park’s entrance and cracked open a bottle of water.

“How many injured, you figure?” I said up at her after a long sip. “How many dead?”

I suddenly chucked the half-filled water bottle in my hand as hard as I could into the middle of the street.

“And why the hell is this happening?!” I yelled at the top of my lungs.

I was losing it a little, I knew. Maybe more than a little. I was beyond frustrated, beyond worried. I’d been hitting it hard for the last couple of days. Watching the mayor get shot was alone enough to give anyone a case of post-traumatic stress disorder.

This whole situation was just so freaking insane!

“I know you’re angry, Mike,” Emily said calmly, after a beat. “We all are, but unfortunately, anger will get us nowhere.”

“Yeah, well, neither is calm, cool, and collected, Emily, if you haven’t noticed,” I said. “That’s why I’m going to try raging pissed-off for a bit. Feel free to join me at any time.”

That’s when Doyle ran at me from across the street, hollering into his radio.

“That was from a uniform who knows the area,” Doyle cried. “He said some super said some kind of device was installed recently on the roof of his building on East Eighty-First, just two blocks from here. He said it’s a metal box that looks burned. That’s what we’re looking for, right?”

Emily and I exchanged a glance.

“That’s exactly what we’re looking for,” she said as she offered me a hand.

Chapter 33

Situated halfway between York and First Avenues, 421 East 81st Street was a narrow six-story disco-era white-brick apartment building.

Waiting for us out in front of the building were agent Ashley Brook Clark, an intense FBI technical analyst, and Dr. Michael Aynard, a pudgy, aging hipster in a yellow-and-brown flannel shirt and big glasses who was a physics professor at NYU and one of the foremost experts on NNEMPs in the world.

There were a lot of mirrors in the building’s small, low-ceilinged lobby and even more tenants — a tense crowd of mostly older people and a few young moms with toddlers. Several had flashlights to ward off the dimness of the unlit lobby, and some had packed suitcases with them.

Everyone except for the children looked distraught and confused. I thought of the thousands upon thousands of people who lived and worked in the area and felt truly terrible for them. The power was out, and all arrows were pointing to it staying out for a long, long time.

This really was a disaster, I thought, not for the first time that day. Like a flood or a hurricane, it was affecting multiple thousands of random innocent people. It was what insurance companies used to call an act of God. I wondered if that was what this was. Someone who believed he was God.

I was snapped out of my wonderings by a wiry middle-aged woman in a ratty green bathrobe who began arguing loudly with the Filipino superintendent by the front door.

“What do you mean you can’t?” the woman cried. “Why do you think we bought the damn thing after Hurricane Sandy? As vice president of the board, I demand that you get that portable generator on now. My medication is going bad as we speak!”

“But I keep explaining. It’s broken, Mrs. Schaeffer,” the young, stocky super said soothingly. “Everything is broken. No one’s phones work, right? See, it’s not just the electricity. There must have been some kind of crazy surge or something. I talked to every super up and down the street. This isn’t a normal blackout.”

“But my medication!” Mrs. Schaeffer insisted.

“Your medication is toast, ma’am, unless you get out of here with it as soon as possible,” Dr. Aynard interrupted in a bored voice. “In fact, unless everyone here is interested in what it’s like to live in the Dark Ages, I recommend you pack up your valuables, pick a direction, and start walking until you find yourself in an area where there’s electricity.”

He cleared his throat.

“Ding-dong! It’s fact-facing time, people,” he said. “The power isn’t coming back on today, tomorrow, or probably for some six months at least, and sitting around here isn’t going to change it.”

“Way to sugarcoat things, Dr. Bedside Manner,” Brooklyn Kale mumbled behind me as we stepped up to the super.

Chapter 34

The superintendent’s name was Lionel Cruz, and after we told him why we were there, he led us across the lobby and up six flights of stairs in a darkened stairwell and out in the rain onto the roof.

The device was in the southeast corner of the roof, on the other side of a dark, looming water tower. A strange, narrow, chest-height aluminum box about three feet wide. I thought it looked almost like a filing cabinet. One whose sides had been ripped open from a small bomb or explosive device that had gone off inside it.

“How did it get up here?” I said to Lionel.

“That’s just the thing,” the super said, shaking his head repeatedly. “I like to think I run a pretty tight ship here, but I have absolutely no idea. I’d check one of the security cameras at the front door or in the garage, but they’re both not working with the power loss. I’d call my staff about it, except the phones are down. I only came up to look around when Mrs. Willett, who lives on the top floor beneath here, said she thought she heard some kind of explosion.”

“Does this look like the device?” Emily said to Agent Clark, who was down on one knee on the tar paper, peering with a flashlight into the strange metal box’s blown-open gap.

“It has to be,” said Dr. Aynard, who was looking over the kneeling tech’s shoulder. “The remains of that metal cylinder there is the armature, and that segment of coiled copper is obviously the stator wiring.”

“And I’d say what’s left of the gas engine in there was the power source,” Agent Clark finished grimly. “This is a textbook flux compression generator bomb.”

“Brilliant, really,” said Aynard as he knocked on the metal housing with a knuckle. “Simple, efficient, not expensive, and highly effective.”

“Oh, it’s brilliant, all right,” said Arturo sarcastically. “Quick! Someone call the Nobel Prize people and nominate the terrorists for efficiently erasing civilization for a hundred square blocks.”

“So you’re saying this small box did the entire neighborhood?” Doyle said.

Aynard winced as he thought about it. He looked in again at the box’s burned remains.

“Maybe not,” he finally said. “Though this device definitely packed quite an electromagnetic punch, it does seem a little small. I’d say there’s probably at least one more somewhere, maybe even two.”

I thought about that. How a box as small as the one before us could do such unbelievable, unheard-of damage. I also thought about how there could be dozens more ready to go off at any moment.

I lifted my radio and called Miriam Schwartz, who was coordinating from the law enforcement staging area by the bridge.

“Miriam, we found the NNEMP,” I said. “But it’s small, and the experts on scene say there are probably more. We’re going to need search teams. Boots on the ground inspecting rooftops.”

“Search teams? For where? The affected area?” she radioed back.

I stared out at the wilderness of buildings in every direction.

“No — for everywhere,” I said. “There could be more of these things all over the city. I think it’s time to assume that there are.”

Chapter 35

The 59th Street bridge staging area had turned into a full-fledged carnival of trailers and tents by the time we got back to it an hour or so later. To the constant hammering of temporary generators, twenty or thirty FBI agents and double that number of NYPD officers were busy setting up a crisis command post.

We had a meeting under a rain-soaked tent, where we got some of the brass up to speed. As per my recommendation, it was needle-in-the-haystack time all over the city. Cops and firemen everywhere were now in the process of searching rooftops.

At the end of the meeting, Chief Fabretti and Bob Madsen, the New York office’s assistant special agent in charge, who were now jointly running the show, named Emily and me the case’s investigative coordinators.

I was definitely pleased to be getting the case lead but even more psyched about officially working with Emily again. We worked well together. We’d stopped a psychopath who was kidnapping and killing rich kids a few years before, and more recently we helped take down a Mexican drug cartel head. Not only was she particularly adept at appeasing the government pen pushers, she also probably had better back-channel contacts in the Bureau’s various investigative support units than the director. She was all about results.

Emily grabbed us a couple of coffees from another tent after the meeting.

“C’mon, Mike. The rain’s falling off a bit. I want to stretch my legs.”

Emily said this casually, but I noticed her expression was pensive, a little standoffish. Her mental gears were spinning up to speed, I knew. Her investigative approach was like mine, one of ebb and flow. The idea was to gather as much info as possible and then back off of it in order to let things sink in. Give one’s initial and intuitive impressions a little time to set, so that after a while, a telltale pattern could be detected. You couldn’t talk things to death. Especially in the beginning.

I followed her out onto 60th Street alongside the base of the bridge. We walked west, staring out at the Upper East Side. An evacuation had been declared a little after noon, and it was quite a spooky scene, with all the stopped cars in the empty streets. It was so silent you could actually hear the dead traffic lights creaking in the breeze at the intersections and the needles of rain drumming on the pavement.

Up on Second Avenue, we stopped and watched as a National Guard unit wrestled a length of chain-link out of the back of a olive-drab army truck. We stood there and watched as the soldiers unwrapped the fencing and held it upright while strapping it to lampposts on opposite sides of the avenue. When they were done, it looked as if everything north of 60th Street had been turned into a prison.

“What the hell?” Emily said in horror. “That looks so wrong.”

“It’s to prevent looting, I guess,” I said, shaking my head.

The last time I saw something like this was on Canal Street after 9/11. Definitely not a memory lane I liked to stroll down.

We turned right and walked north up deserted Second Avenue.

“How’s the kids, Mike?” Emily said out of the blue. “And Seamus? And Mary Catherine, of course.”

I gave her a brief family update as we walked up the desolate avenue. I left out the part about Seamus’s recent memory troubles. I looked around. Life seemed depressing enough.

“That stinks about Mary Catherine stuck in Ireland,” Emily said. “What are you doing about the kids?”

“Seamus finagled a temporary nanny,” I said. “Some nice Irish college kid named Martin. He actually just started today. How about you? Have you been keeping yourself busy?”

“Well,” Emily said, a little less pensive, “I’ve actually been seeing somebody. For about three months now. I guess you could say it’s pretty serious. At least I think it is.” I was shocked to suddenly feel a little crushed when I heard this. It was probably because Emily and I had almost gotten together a few times during previous cases. There was definitely some attraction there between us, a mostly unspoken chemistry. She was a smart, energetic, good-looking woman. And a heck of a hard-hitting investigator. What wasn’t there to be attracted to? But I really shouldn’t have been jealous, especially since Mary Catherine and I were serious now and getting more serious by the moment.

Emily has a right to be happy, too, right? I thought. Sort-of-ish.

“Hey, that’s great, Emily,” I finally said. “Who is he? A cop or a real person?”

Emily laughed.

“He’s a real person, as a matter of fact. He’s a line cook at Montmartre in DC. He’s also a veteran of Afghanistan — a Special Forces medic. His name is Sean Buckhardt. He’s this tall, serious, tough, hardworking man, but underneath, he really cares, you know? About the world, about being alive. And he’s great with Olivia. He’s smart and sarcastic and funny, like you. I really think you’d like him.”

Wanna bet? I thought, glancing into her bright-blue eyes.

“A line cook? That’s a score. Tell me he cooks for you,” I said instead.

“All the time. Does it show?” she said, smiling. “It shows, right? All the butter sauce. I’ll come home from a case, and it’s Provence in my kitchen, with all the courses and the wine pairings. He makes this lemon-chicken thing. I swear it should be on the narcotics list. I must have put on ten pounds.”

That’s a lie, I thought as I watched her do some kind of re-knotting thing with her shoulder-length hair. Out of the corner of my eye, I watched as she walked ahead of me a little. Whatever she was doing, it was working out. Quite well.

But I kept that to myself. Instead, I quickly took out my phone to see if there were any new messages from Mary Catherine.

Bad corner of my eye, I thought.

Chapter 36

The hotel dining room was all but empty as the last couple huddled together at the best table, right by the low turf fire in the massive river-rock fireplace. The candlelight was soft and low, as was the cozy romantic music playing.

“Ga! Will they never leave?” said Mary Catherine’s cousin Donnell as they hung back by the kitchen door, allowing the American couple celebrating their fiftieth anniversary to enjoy a moment.

“Have a heart. It’s romantic,” Mary Catherine said.

“They’ve enjoyed about a trillion and a half moments already, by my calculation,” complained Donnell. “The sun’ll be coming up soon.”

“Go in and help Pete, ya stone-hearted cynic,” Mary Catherine said. “I’ll get them for you and maybe even pass along the tip if you’re lucky.”

“Thank you so much,” the silver-haired American CEO type said after he finally handed over his Amex. He patted his ample midsection. “The lamb, the wine reduction sauce, all of it was—”

“Just perfect. Really,” insisted his pretty brunette wife. “Especially the dessert you sent over. Who would have thought? Real New York cheesecake in Ireland? Where do you get it?”

“I have my sources,” Mary Catherine said with a smile.

Donnell was nowhere to be found when she returned to the kitchen.

“Where is he?” she asked her other cousin Pete, the chef, who tossed a thumb toward the back door.

“Romance in front and now in the back of the house, too, I see,” Mary Catherine cried in mock shock as she busted Donnell canoodling his girlfriend against the side of her car. “Back to work. You can snog on your own time.”

“Are all you Yanks such slave drivers?” Donnell said as he walked past.

“No, you lazy Paddy. Just me,” Mary Catherine said, whipping him in the butt with a towel.

She grabbed a rack of hot glasses from the machine in the corner of the kitchen and brought them in through the swinging door into the hotel bar.

There were a lot of large and loud red-faced men at the bar and even more in the adjoining banquet space. A three-piece rock band was playing in the party room, and everyone was singing the old Squeeze hit “Tempted” at the top of their lungs and drinking Guinness and Harp Lager as fast as she and the bartender, Kevin, could change taps on the basement kegs.

An Australian-rules football club, mostly firemen and cops from Sydney, was in town to play the local Limerick club at various forms of football, and the place was packed. She smiled at the young and happy drunk men who’d been there for the last three days. She really liked the mostly good-natured Ozzies, but if she heard another one ask her what a nice girl like her was doing in a place like this, she was going to start screaming.

The best news of all was that the hotel’s potential buyer, Mr. Fuhrman, a tall, dour German, had come by in the midst of all the merriment about an hour before. He had suddenly seemed pretty merry himself when he saw the place packed to capacity and all the money flying into the till.

“I’m going to make a phone call to the broker on Monday,” Mr. Fuhrman had assured her before he left. “And I think you’re going to like what you hear.”

“Hey, Mary Catherine. Did you see this?” said Kevin, suddenly pointing up at the TV.

She looked up. The BBC was on. Behind a sleek glass anchor desk sat a sharp-faced blonde wearing a deadly serious expression.

Then Mary read the graphic on the screen beneath the anchorwoman, and the glasses in the racks rattled loudly as she set them down heavily on the bar.

NEW YORK ATTACKED! it said.

“Turn it up, Kevin,” she said as the image on the TV changed to a shot of the stranded Roosevelt Island tram.

“FBI sources have confirmed that this is yet another attack seemingly carried out by terrorists,” said the British anchor.

Another attack! What?

She flew behind the bar and grabbed her bag and dug out her cell phone. It almost slipped out of her hand, and she had to take a deep breath before she managed to focus enough to find the speed dial for the apartment. She bit her lower lip as she waited, listening to silence.

“C’mon,” she said, waiting on the connection. “Pick up, Michael. C’mon, pick up!”

Chapter 37

That night at a quarter after seven, cranky, definitely drained, and yet at the same time extremely grateful just to be here, I stepped off my elevator and finally made glorious contact with the loose brass knob of my apartment’s front door.

Sometimes bad days at work depressed me and stayed with me, but this was one of the days that made me happy just for the fact that it was over and I’d gotten through it in one piece.

I was locking the apartment door behind me when a horrendous crunching sound ripped out from the vicinity of the kitchen.

I peeked inside and saw Martin, with his back to me, throwing a bunch of carrots into a blender. He seems to be in one piece, I thought. The same busy, assured, positive, energetic person who’d come to work this morning. First days were tough. Especially ones that involved taking care of double-digit kids. But it was looking like it had gone well enough. Excellent, I thought. So far, so good.

Instead of interrupting him, I peeked into the living room.

Uh-oh. Maybe not so good, I thought when I saw the kids.

All the boys were there except Brian. They were lying all over the place. Eddie was passed out on the ottoman. Ricky was on the carpet, red-faced and staring, dazed, up at the ceiling. Trent, huffing and puffing, was sprawled facedown on the couch.

Seamus, who was on the end of the couch, thumbing through the Irish Voice newspaper, rolled his eyes at me.

“What’s wrong with them, Father?” I said.

“I don’t know. I just got in myself, and they won’t say,” said Seamus. “They keep sighing and moaning, though. I believe they’ve come down with some sickness perhaps mental in nature.”

“Help, Dad. Just help,” said Eddie as he looked up weakly from the ottoman.

“He makes us run, Dad,” said Trent, pointing toward the crunching sound in the kitchen. “We were doing drills. Soccer drills.”

“You made Mary Catherine disappear and replaced her with a drill sergeant,” Ricky said. “We’re not that bad, are we? Well, I mean, we’re sort of bad, but this bad? Honestly, what did we do?”

The blender stopped, then whirred again.

“And he says he’s making us smoothies,” said Eddie. “But I saw vegetables, Dad. He bought vegetables from the corner market! I definitely saw carrots and even some green stuff. That’s not a smoothie, Dad. That’s V8 juice!”

“Give it up, fellas,” I said with a smile. “You couch-potato Nintendo athletes could use some running around. Not to mention some vegetables. Mary Catherine would be pleased.”

Chapter 38

I was turning into the hallway near the back bedrooms when I ran into the female Bennett contingent near the rumbling washer and dryer. They glared at me in unison. Another group of unhappy campers, apparently.

“First the boys, now you,” I said. “What’s wrong? What are you guys up to?”

“Doing our laundry, thank you very much, Father,” said Juliana.

“But Martin can handle that,” I said.

Six sets of female eyes glared back at me in unholy unison.

“Are you nuts, Dad?” said Jane. “Do you know how embarrassing that would be? Martin is not — and I mean never — doing my laundry. Or I’ll... run away!”

“We all will if that man in there even glances at the laundry of any female member of this family,” chimed in Fiona.

“Forever!” said Chrissy.

“Forever? Wow, okay, ladies. I’ll work on it. Sheesh,” I said, slowly backing away.

“Hey there, Martin. How’d the first day go?” I said back in the kitchen.

“Ah, they’re great, so they are,” said Martin. “They complained a bit about the running around, what with the rain and all, but that’s natural. Listen, I think that little one there — Trent, is it? — has some real potential as a footballer, especially for a three-footed Yank, but what are we talkin’ about my day at work for? I heard it on the radio. They hit us again, have they?”

I nodded.

“Is it bad?”

“It’s pretty bad, Martin,” I said.

“And I thought the troubles in Northern Ireland were bad. Who’s doing it? Is it those al Qaeda nut jobs again, do ya think?”

I shrugged.

“We don’t know yet.”

“Well, I thought it best to keep the TV off on account of the youngest ones,” Martin said. “I thought you’d handle the situation best.”

“Good call, Martin,” I said.

And now for another, I thought, taking out my phone and hitting a speed-dial number.

“Hey, Tony,” I said. “I’d like to get four large pies, one plain, two sausage, and one with pepperoni.”

“Mike, whatcha doin’? Don’t bother with that. I got dinner covered. I’m making them some smoothies with Caesar salad.”

“Hey, that’s perfect, Martin,” I said. “We’ll have everything with the pizza.”

Chapter 39

“Mmm, this pizza sure is good,” I said in the dead silence to break the ice.

It certainly needed some breaking. I looked around the table at the kids with their faces downturned at their food. It was suddenly Buckingham Palace formal and pin-drop silent with Martin having joined us for dinner.

“Fine. I’ll say it if no one else will, Dad. Are we all going to die or what?” said Brian around a mouthful of pepperoni.

“What?” I said, glaring at him.

“What’s wrong?” asked Bridget.

“Oh, it’s nothing really, little sis. We’re just under attack by a bunch of insane terrorists again,” Brian said, staring at me like it was my fault. “Not for nothing, Dad, but if we have to move again somewhere, you can count me out. I’m going to lie about my age and join the marines or something.”

“Relax,” I said, looking around the table. “There was a blackout on the East Side. They think somebody did it deliberately. That’s all. We don’t know who’s doing it, okay? It’s a mess, and we need to pray for a lot of poor people who are affected, but it’s okay. Honestly.”

“Okay?” said Juliana. “First they blow up a train tunnel, then they kill the mayor, and now—”

“You’re going to pass the garlic salt, young lady, and we’re all going to have some nice dinner-table conversation,” I insisted loudly.

I guess I was a little louder than I intended to be, because everyone stared at me like I was nuts. Except for Martin, who, I could see, was trying hard not to laugh at me and the rest of us Bennett lunatics from behind his napkin.

In the awkward silence, I suddenly tossed out an even more awkward conversation starter.

“Hey, how about those Yanks, Eddie, huh? Pettitte’s looking sharp, isn’t he?”

Eddie stared at me quizzically, as though I had just grown another head.

“Well?” I said again, louder.

Eddie put his slice down on his paper plate carefully.

“I don’t know, Dad,” he said slowly. “He’s retired.”

That’s when Martin couldn’t hold it in anymore and burst out laughing. Seamus joined him. Then everybody else.

“Go ahead. Yuck it up, everybody. See this, Martin? It’s laugh-at-Daddy time here at the Bennett abode. It’s a common dinnertime stress reliever,” I said, sticking out my tongue at them before I started laughing at myself. “Works every time.”

I leaped up immediately three minutes later when the phone rang. It was Mary Catherine, I saw on the caller ID in the living room. Finally! I was so eager to talk to her that I managed to hang up instead of pick up, and I was placing the handset back down when she called back.

“Finally, Mike! Oh, you had me so worried!” Mary Catherine said. “I had the damnedest time getting through. I just saw the news. What’s going on? Tell me everybody is okay.”

“We’re all fine, Mary Catherine. Everybody is as healthy and sarcastic as ever,” I said.

“But what is this EMP bomb? What about the nuclear stuff they were saying on the news?”

Even after I explained it to her as best I could, she — like everyone else — didn’t seem very reassured.

“How’s things on your end?” I said, changing the subject.

“The new buyer is looking very serious. I’ll know on Monday,” she said.

I could hear the smile in her voice.

“I’ll keep my fingers crossed,” I said, hearing music in the background. “Are you celebrating already?”

“Oh, no. That’s just some Australians reliving the eighties.”

“Any room for an American?” I said. “I could be there in six hours. I do a killer Depeche Mode.”

Mary Catherine laughed.

“Wow, how I wish I were there with you, Michael. I can’t tell you how much I miss those kids, too. All of them.”

“All of them?”

“Oh, Michael, you’ll never know. Every little stinker in the bunch. It’s killing me not being there. What did that oil-spill CEO guy say? ‘I want my life back.’”

“I want our life back,” I said.

There was a pause.

“I have to go,” said Mary Catherine.

“So do I,” I said.

There was a pause.

“Why haven’t you hung up yet?” I said.

“I was just about to ask you the same thing.”

We laughed. There was another pause.

Then it happened.

“I love you,” I said.

I heard a gasp and then a loud earful of dial tone a second later.

What the hell are you doing? I thought, smiling at my reflection in the TV screen.

I’m reliving the eighties, all right, I thought as I realized that I had butterflies in my stomach. I felt like I was about sixteen. I liked it.

“Detective Bennett, what have you finally gone and done?” I mumbled as I stood.

Chapter 40

My cell phone rang a little after three o’clock that morning. Like most calls that come at ungodly hours, it was not good. It was from Neil Fabretti, the chief of detectives himself.

“Mike, sorry to bother you. I just got off the phone with the new mayor’s people. The gist of it is they’re beyond pissed at the pace of the investigation and want whoever’s on it off it and someone new put on pronto.”

Though I was a little stunned to actually hear it, part of me had been waiting for this call. I’d been on high-profile cases before, and I knew that now with several people dead, including the mayor, tens of thousands of people displaced, and millions more on edge, the pressure to do something, even unfairly sacrificing a convenient scapegoat like me, was immense.

Good investigations were about being patient and meticulous, but that wasn’t exactly a popular sentiment, I knew from reading yesterday’s New York Post headline, WHAT THE #$%@ IS BEING DONE?

When you lost the usually NYPD-friendly Post, you knew you were in deep trouble.

“Is that right?” I finally said.

“Yeah, well, I told them to pound sand,” Fabretti continued, surprising me. “I said that we couldn’t just go shuffling investigators around because of the pressure of the twenty-four/seven news cycle. I told them you were the best we had and that I was behind you one hundred percent, yada, yada, yada.

“But there’s a big meeting scheduled for one o’clock this afternoon at the commissioner’s office, and you need to be there for the investigation’s update with bells on, if you know what I’m saying. Nothing personal, but the reality is, if you want to keep being the lead on this, Mike, you got about ten hours to make something drop.”

“I’ll be there. Thanks for the ‘look out’ and the heads-up, Chief,” I said before I hung up.

Wide awake now, I knew it was time to make my own 3:00 a.m. calls to see if there had been any developments. Doyle and Arturo didn’t pick up, but I caught Brooklyn Kale burning the midnight oil at the NYPD intelligence desk we’d been assigned.

“Mike, thank goodness. I was just going to call you,” she said.

“What have you got, Brooklyn?”

“Something good for a change. We got video of the guys — two guys — bringing the EMP device into East Eighty-First Street.”

“Video?” I said. “But I thought the super said that the on-site computer where they store the feed was fried with the EMP.”

“It was, but we canvassed at the high-rise across the street, and it turns out their video is run by a national firm that backs up everything off-site. The security firm sent the film over about an hour ago. It’s beautiful. You can see the guys bringing in the box, Mike... the plates on the van they were driving — the whole shebang. Check your e-mail. I just sent a clip of it to you.”

I opened the video.

It was incredible.

I thought it was going to be the two men from the video of the train tunnel bombing, but it wasn’t. I watched in color as two young guys in a white van, college kids, maybe, pulled into the garage next to the building and unloaded the metal device onto a hand truck.

“The plates on the van look funny to you?” I said to Brooklyn as I hit Pause. “They’re New York State, but what are they? Commercial?”

“Yep. Already ran them. The van is from a Hertz location downtown — or at least its plates are,” Brooklyn said. “Doyle’s on the phone with the manager, who’s on his way in. The manager said you can’t rent without a credit card and a driver’s license, so we’re looking good on a potential lead there. I’ll hit you with it the second Doyle calls me back and I hear anything.”

“Great job, Brooklyn,” I said.

“One more thing, Mike, that just came up. May or may not be related,” she said. “Two young men were just found shot dead at a construction site on Roosevelt Island. I called the desk sergeant at the public safety department on the island, and he told me they don’t have ID on them, but the general description seems about the same as these two guys on the video. You want me to head out there or stay here coordinating?”

A lead was a lead, I knew from experience. Even if the suspects were no longer in a position to talk to us, they could still provide us with valuable information.

“No, you stay there,” I said. “I’ll grab Agent Parker and check it out.”

Chapter 41

Twenty-six minutes after I hung up the phone, I sat in my unmarked on Seventh Avenue and 50th Street, staring at the garish neon lights as they geysered and flashed silently on the beautiful people-filled billboards above the worn and empty concrete canyons of Times Square.

As the song says, New York City never sleeps, but between 4:15 and 4:30 a.m., it sometimes takes a quick catnap. Even so, it was weird seeing Times Square devoid of people. Not to mention quite off-putting under the horrible circumstances.

I saw that Emily’s hair was still wet from her shower when she finally appeared at a run from her glass-fronted hotel. I smiled to myself as she pulled the car door open. The sight of her was anything but lonely.

“Let me bring you up to speed on some economic forensics I did on the mayor’s shooter, Alex Mirzoyan,” Emily said, thumbing her smartphone as we headed east for Roosevelt Island.

“First, the good news. That robotic gun-aiming device used in the mayor’s assassination is highly specialized, and we were able to track down the manufacturer. The company is giving us some pushback after we asked for their customer list, but we have the US attorney drawing up a warrant, and I think we’ll be making progress there.”

“What about the ownership of the apartment the shooter was in?” I said.

Emily scrolled through screens on her phone.

“No dice there, unfortunately. Apparently, the owner is a Columbia University international law professor who’s in Brussels for a semester’s sabbatical. It doesn’t seem like he’s involved. He rented it out anonymously for a thousand dollars a week through one of those Internet house-swapping services to a fake e-mail address that Mirzoyan must have set up called woopwoop-two-two-six at AOL dot com.”

“Well, it eliminates me as a suspect, at least,” I said, shaking my head. “My fake e-mail address is woopwoop-two-two-six at Yahoo dot com.”

“Very funny,” Emily said, tapping her smartphone screen again. “But what’s more promising is some weird stuff we found with Mirzoyan’s finances. Last week he opened a PayPal account that had three thousand dollars wired into it, which he immediately withdrew from a bank in South Miami.”

I glanced over at her.

“Expense money?” I said. “So he could come up to New York?”

“Could be. Like we’re doing with the rifle company, we’re in the process of having the attorney’s office try to persuade PayPal to tell us who the mysterious someone who wired the money is.”

Chapter 42

We were in Queens twenty minutes later. I got turned around after I got off the first exit of the Midtown Tunnel and wandered around the industrial maze of Long Island City for a bit.

“How are we lost, Mike?” said Emily, yawning. “I thought you were Mr. Native New Yorker.”

“I am, Emily, but this isn’t New York, it’s Queens,” I said, making a U-turn. “I mean, we just passed Forty-First Avenue and Twenty-First Street — or was it Twenty-First Avenue and Forty-First Street? Cops from other boroughs usually have to leave a trail of doughnut crumbs behind them in order to find their way back out.”

“What is this crazy place, Mike? Roosevelt Island, I mean,” Emily said as we rolled south under several varieties of train and car underpasses and finally swung onto the small, two-lane Roosevelt Island Bridge.

“Oh, just another one of the bizarre real estate situations you find in this crazy city,” I said. “I think it used to be the site of a mental asylum in the early 1900s, and then they put up some kind of rent-subsidized housing complex. I guess its claim to fame is that it has its very own ski chalet — like cable car you can take to get into Manhattan.”

“A Euro ski tram in New York City?” said Emily, her midwestern face scrunching. “Is it a heavily Swiss immigrant neighborhood or something?”

“Like I said, this is Queens, Emily.” I nodded out at the water. “What happens in Queens stays in Queens.”

The crime scene was at the base of the 59th Street Bridge, toward the south end of the small, narrow island.

I could see that the contingent of cops already waiting for us was definitely much larger than what you’d see at a regular homicide scene. In addition to at least four blue-and-whites from the island’s public safety people, there was a wagon circle of various unmarked detective cars, FDNY ambulances, the medical examiner’s mobile command center, and even an NYPD Emergency Services Unit truck.

Walking through the flashing blue and red lights toward the tape, I spotted Lieutenant Bryce Miller standing with his ESU intelligence commando cowboys. Even before the crack of dawn, the tall and polished pretty boy, looking like a soap opera actor, was in his power suit, ready for his close-up.

“Hey, Bennett. Glad you could make it,” Bryce said sarcastically as we went past him.

He must be a pretty good intel guy after all, I thought, nodding at him. It seemed that he, too, had heard the rumors about my upcoming demise as case lead.

I was coming around the back of the buslike medical examiner’s mobile command center when I saw the ME himself, Tom Durham, helping one of his assistants slide the first of the two stretchers with the already body-bagged suspects on them up a ramp to the vehicle’s back door.

“Hold it there, Tom,” I said to the NBA-tall medical examiner, whom I’d worked with a few times about a decade earlier, when I was in Homicide.

“Mike Bennett,” Durham said, peeling off his rubber glove to shake my hand over the corpse. “Well, well, out of the mists of time. You’ve put on weight.”

“Ah, c’mon, Tom,” I said. “You know how these blue and red lights always put on ten pounds. This is my partner, Emily. Any chance you find any ID on these two?”

“Nope. Not a thing. We already printed them, too, for that guy in the suit over there. No help there, either, apparently.”

“You mind if we take a quick peek at them?” I said.

“Nope,” Tom said, grabbing the body-bag zipper. “And neither will they, I imagine.”

I placed the video still of the darker kid next to the kid on the gurney. The kid’s head was grotesquely deformed from several gunshot wounds, but I thought the picture looked like him.

“What do you think?” I said to Emily.

“I think it’s him,” she said.

Tom looked over her shoulder.

“Me, too,” the ME said with a nod.

We quickly ID’d the other suspect as the second guy who dropped off the EMP device. We needed names, though. Somehow. There was no way I was going to allow this to be yet another dead end.

I thanked Tom, but instead of heading back to the car, I pocketed my phone and walked with Emily away from the police lights to the rocky edge of the island’s dark shore.

“Wait a second,” I said after a minute of looking out over the water. “Look.”

Across the quick current of choppy water, not too far away at the Manhattan base of the bridge, were the lights of our crisis post for the Yorkville disaster.

“The bastards were right here watching us yesterday, weren’t they?” Emily said in shock. “Watching us scramble. The panic. All those poor souls having to be evacuated from the hospitals. They just stood here happily watching the results of what they’d done.”

“And by leaving the bodies right here, I guess they want us to know it,” I said.

“I’m really starting to not like these fellas, Mike,” Emily said as she kicked a broken kayak handle into the water. “I mean, not even a little bit.”

Chapter 43

Several hectic hours later that day, at ten to one, Emily and I waited in a narrow, crowded hallway before a set of double doors on the eighth floor of One Police Plaza.

On the other side of the doors, we could hear a voice droning on as we hastily went over the final details of the report we were about to give to the police commissioner and acting mayor and various and sundry other officials.

The door of the thunderdome opened after a minute, and Chief Fabretti was there.

“Mike, you ready?” he said.

The coliseum-like, bowl-shaped CompStat conference room behind him was a pen pusher’s paradise, I knew. It was a place where innovative computer-model formats were used to illuminate detailed processes that were compared for effectiveness of indices of performance before implementations of flexible tactics to achieve the development of comprehensive solutions were discussed in a team-building environment.

In plain English, it was a bureaucratic version of hell on earth.

But before I could answer the chief’s question, Emily and I were inside, front and center.

There were about twenty or thirty people up on the amphitheater-style seats surrounding us, a lot of tense-looking NYPD and FBI brass, and the acting mayor. Also some suits from the White House, we’d been told.

If I needed any further indication of what was at stake, I saw it on the whiteboard that the last speaker had been using. Two words had been written with a Sharpie in large black letters.

EVACUATION PLAN

“Who the hell is this again?” said the acting mayor over the rim of her eyeglasses.

The tall, long-necked, white-haired woman’s name was Priscilla Atkinson, and I almost felt like asking the Park Avenue — raised grande dame the same question, as her only experience before being named deputy mayor was running public events for the Central Park Conservancy.

Instead I began.

“Hi. I’m Detective Bennett. This is Special Agent Parker, and we’d like to bring everybody up to date on what we have so far.”

An aide whispered in the acting mayor’s ear.

“One question,” Atkinson said, interrupting me. “What’s going on, Detective Bennett? Who’s doing this to us, and why the hell haven’t you found them yet?”

Instead of pointing out that she’d just asked, in fact, three questions, I continued.

“I’m here to answer everybody’s questions, Ms. Mayor, okay? I’ve been informed that everybody has already been briefed about the EMP device we discovered. What you may not be aware of is that last night, we were able to obtain video footage of men — two men — placing the object on the East Side building’s roof.”

“Are they the same two men seen on the video at the train bombing?” said the commissioner from the row beneath the mayor.

“No, they’re not, Mr. Commissioner,” said Emily. “They were different men.”

“Have you ID’d them? Who the hell are they?” demanded the mayor.

“We’ve located them, ma’am,” I said, “and we’ve actually just ID’d them as two recent NYU grads.”

“Why’d they do it?”

“We don’t know. We found them this morning in a Dumpster at a construction site on Roosevelt Island, both shot multiple times in the head.”

That got the murmuring going.

“The men ran a marketing firm. They’re local kids with no terrorist ties,” Emily said before the mayor could jump in with another stupid obvious question. “We think they were hired by the people behind this.”

“So we’re still in the dark?” said Ms. Atkinson.

“Not entirely,” I said. “We scoured their Internet and phone records and discovered that both were paid large sums of money over the Internet through what seems to be the same PayPal account. With the help of federal authorities, we are in the process of tracking down the owner of the account.”

“Get to it, Bennett,” the commissioner said after a beat. “Keep us apprised.”

I nodded at him and at Lieutenant Bryce Miller sitting below the commissioner like the good little doggie he was.

Guess I’m still on the case after all, Brycey, I mentally texted him.

As Fabretti showed us the door, I saw one of the White House suits start BlackBerrying like crazy; I hoped they were putting some pressure on PayPal to cough up a name. The mayor nodded at us before she took off her glasses and rubbed her eyes. Seeing the obvious great concern and worry in her suddenly old-seeming face, I felt bad for her. She was just as strained and concerned and tired as the rest of us. And that was saying a lot.

Chapter 44

That night at around 9:30, approximately fifty-five miles due north of New York City, Emily turned off her phone as I pulled my unmarked off a backcountry road into a remote campground at Clarence Fahnestock Memorial State Park, on the border between Putnam and Dutchess Counties.

Unfortunately, we weren’t at the state park for a midnight weenie roast. There were at least a dozen New York state trooper vehicles already in the large parking lot, along with the same number of unmarked FBI Crown Victorias. Beyond a trooper command bus were two matte-black BearCat troop trucks, and at the end of the lot, in a muddy clearing, sat a bulky olive-drab Black Hawk helicopter with military markings.

We were finally on the hunt now. At around five that afternoon, PayPal had revealed the name of the person who had sent funds to both the mayor’s shooter and the dead EMP guys, and it was a doozy.

The name on the PayPal transfer was Jamil al Gharsi. Al Gharsi was a Yemeni-born Muslim cleric who was already on the FBI’s terrorist watchlist, suspected of running a militant and potentially violent Islamic group on a grubby cattle farm five miles due east of Fahnestock State Park.

Al Gharsi’s two dozen — strong group had a website that billed them as a kind of Muslim Cub Scouts, though they were anything but. The FBI had been following them closely since their inception six months ago, and they had been observed training with weapons.

The group also had ties to al Qaeda in Yemen, which boggled my mind. Why hadn’t they been shut down already? No one knew, or at least no one would say. If al Gharsi’s group turned out to be responsible for the bombings and for the assassination in New York, I was truly going to kick somebody’s ass. If Homeland Security had let yet another Islamic terrorist attack occur, I was going to be the first to propose its disbanding.

Emily and I passed a bunch of troopers wearing their Smokey the Bear hats and climbed onto the crowded bus, where the FBI’s Hostage Rescue Team had already started its briefing.

A flat screen behind the driver’s seat showed a series of photographs from reconnaissance that had already been done.

The pictures featured a cluster of buildings in the center of a large hilly field near the bottom of a ridge. There was an old farmhouse — a low concrete building that almost looked like a school — and a large dilapidated barn that was listing so far to the left it looked as if some magic spell had frozen it in the midst of collapse.

“This is al Gharsi,” the HRT leader, Terry Musa, said as he handed out a printout showing a mean-looking bald guy with a beard that would make any of the Boston Red Sox’s starting lineup green with envy.

“He is six foot three,” Musa said as he tightened a strap on his helmet. “He is also a mixed martial artist and one tough bastard, apparently. We don’t know what kind of weapons or explosives we’re going to encounter. I wouldn’t even recommend going in on the bird with this EMP shit, but there’s no other way. So bottom line, be very, very fucking careful, okay, folks? Paying these assholes back won’t be any fun if you’re dead.”

Chapter 45

At the end of the briefing, Emily and I, along with two trooper teams, were assigned to watch a back road up on the ridge behind the farm.

Fifteen minutes later, with our headlights off, we coasted to a stop on a tree-lined gravel road beside a barred cattle gate. Beyond the gate was another gravel road that curved down to the left, out of sight through some trees. Down below the trees were the fields and farm.

When the other two teams radioed that they were in position a hundred feet back down the road behind us, I turned off the car and rolled down the window.

I looked down at the farm’s rugged, unkempt fields. It was some desolate-looking country, all right. An almost constant wind whistled in the creaking roadside pines and white birches around us, like something out of The Blair Witch Project. Like most born-and-bred New York cops, the country at night always scared the hell out of me.

“Did you know they say Rip Van Winkle fell asleep around these parts?” I said after a minute to fill the creepy silence.

“I thought that was the Catskills,” Emily said.

“You’re right. Maybe I’m thinking of the Headless Horseman,” I said as I heard a low thumping.

I looked up as the FBI’s Black Hawk swung over the ridge above the car.

“Here we go,” I said, turning up the radio.

The world went green as I peered through the night-vision telescope we’d been supplied with. As I got the farmhouse below in focus, I could see the chopper hovering over its roof and the FBI commandos already fast-roping into the front yard. Blasts of green-tinged light blazed at the house’s front windows as the FBI guys tossed flashbangs.

That’s when I heard a sound up on the wooded hill beside the car. I heard it again. Something crackling, something moving through the trees and underbrush to our left.

“A deer?” Emily whispered beside me as I swung the night-vision scope.

She was wrong.

At the top of a small hill through the trees, I could see three men coming directly at us. I made out that they were large and in camo and had long beards before I tossed the night scope and swung around for the backseat.

“Shit! It’s them! Get behind the car!” I hissed at Emily as I turned and grabbed my M4 off the backseat.

I double-clicked it from safe to full auto and flung the door open. Wet mud sucked at my knees as I rolled beside the car into a prone shooting position.

The men, who must have finally seen the car, stopped suddenly halfway down the hill.

My heart bashing a hole in my chest, I managed to sight on the first man as I yelled, “Police! Down! All of you! Now!”

They looked at each other, then started whispering as they stayed on their feet. One of them was taller than the other two, I saw. Was it al Gharsi? Damn it, what were they doing? Did they have guns? Suicide vests? I wondered.

They definitely weren’t listening. I decided I needed to change that.

The silence of the night shattered into a million pieces as I went ahead and squeezed off a long burst of about a dozen or so.223 rounds up the hill. Wood splinters and leaves flew as I raked lead all over the trees and forest floor in front of them.

“We give up! Please don’t shoot!” one of them said as all three of them dropped into the fetal position.

I stood with the gun to my shoulder and my finger still on the trigger as I heard the sweet sound of the first trooper car screaming up the gravel road.

Chapter 46

“This is total bullshit! This is racism! I know my rights. How dare you shoot at me on my own property?” said the large and broad-shouldered al Gharsi as he glared hatefully at me in the back of his crumbling farmhouse a tense twenty minutes later.

“Hey, I’m not the daring one, Al,” I said, kicking a cardboard box of double-aught shotgun shells across his dirty, scuffed floor. “Running a jihadist camp in New York State sixty miles from Ground Zero? Talk about chutzpah.”

And talk about living off the grid, I thought, shaking my head at the surroundings. The house was barely habitable. There was no phone, and what little electricity there was, was provided by a small propane generator. I couldn’t decide which part of the decor was more charming — the little room off the kitchen, where a roughly butchered deer lay on a homemade plywood table, or the upstairs bedrooms, where Arabic graffiti covered the walls above sleeping bags.

Handcuffed behind his back, al Gharsi shifted uncomfortably on a ratty, faded orange couch, where he sat bookended by two standing FBI commandos. The only other furniture was a massive green metal gun locker in a far corner and twelve pale immaculate prayer mats set in a disturbingly precise four-by-three rectangle in the center of the room.

The locker had kicked out some good news for a change. Several of the semiautomatic AK-47s inside had been illegally converted to fully automatic. A felony federal weapons violation would be a good start at gaining some leverage to find out just what in the hell was going on.

“This is not a jihadist camp,” al Gharsi said through yellow gritted teeth. “We are woodsmen, hunters.”

“Woodsmen,” I said with a laugh. “I guess that Arabic on the walls up there says, ‘Give a hoot, don’t pollute.’ You’re not woodsmen, but I’ll concede that you are hunters. It’s what you’re hunting that’s the problem.”

I walked behind al Gharsi and took the photographs Emily was holding. The black-and-white blown-up stills showed the two men from the subway tunnel bombing.

“Who are they?” I said, flapping the photographs in front of al Gharsi’s face.

He shrugged as he studiously refused to look at them.

“Who are they?” I said again, patiently.

“Wait. I know them. Yes,” he said, nodding, as he finally glanced at the pictures. “The one on the left, his name is... let’s see... Fuck. That’s it. His name is Fuck, and the one on the right is... um... You, I believe. There they are together, Fuck and You, my dear old friends.”

“That’s pretty good, Al. Your delivery needs a little work, but it’s almost happily surprising to see that you have any sense of humor at all.”

That’s when I walked behind him again and took a document and another picture from Emily. I showed him the PayPal stuff along with a photo of him sending funds from the nearby library.

“Last Thursday at three o’clock, you sent money to these two different accounts. I want to know why.”

“What?” he said, peering at the photo.

“You sent money. Why?”

There was a glimmer of something in his face then. Recognition, definitely. Then a little confusion. Then his mask of impertinence was back. After a moment, he gave me a cold yellow smile.

“I want my lawyer,” he said.

I smiled back.

“Don’t worry, Al. A lawyer will be provided for you. That’s what makes our country so great, you see. Free lawyers, stuff like that. Maybe one day you might want to ask yourself why you want to wreck it so badly.”

He started laughing then.

“More amusement, Al?” I said. “I got you all wrong. You’re just a big teddy bear, aren’t you?”

“You’re here about the attacks,” he said. “The mayor, the bombing, the EMP.”

“Why, yes,” I said. “Have you heard anything about these things, by chance?”

“No,” al Gharsi said calmly. “But I must admit, I am quite a fan of whoever is so brilliantly attacking New York City and bringing this corrupt-to-the-core Great Satan to its knees.”

Al started chuckling again.

“You think I have something to do with it. Me! You come up here with your helicopters and men kicking in the door. But you are clueless. You are losing. You are flailing. You don’t even know which direction to duck. Allah willing, you are about to be defeated, I think.”

A minute later, I left the living room and followed Emily out of the house and onto the back porch.

In the farmyard’s sole electric light, thirty yards to the south, some shoeless middle-school-age kids, al Gharsi’s, probably, were kicking a basketball around as troopers interviewed blackclad, burka-wearing aunts and mothers. I wished suddenly that I were home with my own kids.

“What do you think?” I said to Emily.

“I think what you think,” Emily said. “I think we just dug ourselves another dry hole.”

Chapter 47

Sixty-five miles due south, between the Brooklyn neighborhoods of Fort Greene and Bedford-Stuyvesant, three glowing windows stood out sharply on the top floor of the Pratt Institute’s otherwise dark North Hall building.

On the other side of the translucent window shades was a large, white-walled lab space that was the showpiece of Pratt’s brand-new robotics facility. At its center, a young man and two young women sat at the largest of the stainless steel lab tables, side by side, working busily.

They had an assembly line going. Aaron started off with the brushless motor controller and flywheel and the flywheel’s braking mechanism. Gia, who had a light touch with the soldering iron, fit in the tiny electronics board and the radio receiver, while Shui popped in rolling-pin-like magnets and put additional magnets onto the face of the small, square white plastic panels.

The finished product was a white-and-silver cube about the size of a quarter. It looked innocuous enough, like a tiny futuristic children’s block.

But these definitely were not Junior’s LEGOs, Shui thought as she clicked on the mini robot’s test software on the iPad.

Immediately there was a whirring sound as the computer-initiated radio signal activated the bot’s interior flywheel. When the computer-dictated amount of RPMs were reached, the flywheel halted suddenly, catapulting the bot across the table. Another whir and flip, and the bot snapped into position onto the end of a line of six minibots that were already arranged in a straight row.

Then, with another click on the iPad, the magic really began as the tiny minibots started leapfrogging each other, moving steadily across the table just as a half-track would roll over a tank. Shui knew she was supposed to place the bots carefully into a foam-lined box at the end of the counter, but the boss wasn’t around, was he? One by one, she made the minibots whir and flip into the box.

“Ah, my aching wrists!” said Gia, a 4.0 junior, as she removed her magnifying goggles. “There has to be a labor law against this. How long have we been at it? Ten hours now? I feel like one of those kids in India forced to hand-roll cigarettes. I mean, I really think I’m getting carpal tunnel syndrome.”

“Now, now. Time is money. We’re not getting paid by the hour but by the minibot, remember? Keep rowing the slave boat so Aaron the Baron here can score himself some nice front-row seats at Coachella,” Aaron said, snapping components together and flicking them toward Gia as though they were lunch-table footballs.

“No one is going to get paid a dime if these bots are damaged, damn it,” said Dr. Seth Keshet as he stormed in.

Fresh from running the world-renowned PhD program at Carnegie Mellon’s Robotics Institute, tall, dark, and cocky Keshet was one of the top three people in the world in digital topology. But with his meticulously tailored casual suits and visible chest hair, he acted more like a scuzzy Eurotrash club lizard than a famous scientist.

“How many?” he wanted to know.

“A hundred and eleven,” said Aaron.

“I need another hundred.”

“Another hundred? We’ve been hitting it since three this afternoon. By when?”

“Six a.m.”

“Six? You’re effing kidding me. We’ve been going ten hours now.”

“Stop whining. We’re on a deadline,” the doctor said, checking his Patek Philippe. “That’s why I pay you the big bucks.”

Aaron pondered this for a moment with a thoroughly depressed look on his face. Then he finally stood.

“I’m sorry, Professor, but I’m done,” he said. “You keep your fifty a bot. I can’t take it anymore. I’m done. Total toast. I’m going to drop right here.”

“Exactly, Seth,” said Shui, with an uncharacteristic defiance in her voice. “We’re not bots, we’re humans. You seem to have lost sight of that.”

“Okay, okay,” the professor said, changing his tune instantly from demanding to charming. “Sorry for being such an ass. I’m under a lot of pressure. I’ll double your pay for tonight. A hundred a bot, but only if you finish.”

Aaron looked at him and blew out a breath.

“Fine,” he said. “But we’re going to need more pizza.”

“And Red Bull,” said Gia.

“As you wish, my children. Daddy will go get the refreshments,” said Keshet as he left the lab.

His iPhone jingled as he hit the school building’s concrete stairwell.

How are we looking? the client had texted.

We’re on target, Mr. Joyce. No worries. Everything will be ready by six as you said, Keshet texted back.

Chapter 48

The sun broke over the top of the trees on the High Line in Chelsea as a dingy white van with the words HARRISON BROS PLUMBING on its side pulled to a stop on West 27th Street between Eleventh and Twelfth Avenues.

As the van idled, a waiflike man-child in a designer business suit biked past over the side street’s half-lit, worn pavement. Then a whistling homeless man followed, towing a dirty white leather PING golf bag piled with jingling empties.

Once the men had passed, Mr. Beckett opened the rear door of the van and stepped out onto the street dressed like a plumber.

With the minibots secured, he was there to retrieve the last item on their shopping list. And it was, as the Americans said, quite a doozy.

The plumber’s getup was probably a little overkill, he thought. But his image had to be in the hands of the authorities by now, so every caution was most prudent, he knew, as he hit the buzzer of a familiar faded brick tenement building on the street’s north side.

Upstairs, Senturk, the bodyguard, was already standing in the open doorway at the end of the second-floor corridor. He wore gray slacks and nice Italian shoes and a white silk dress shirt that was just a little too tight for his soda machine of a torso.

Mr. Beckett felt a rare bead of sweat roll down his back as the green-eyed, muscular Turk wanded him with the metal detector. He knew the man had been in the Milli Istihbarat Teskilati back when the Turkish version of the CIA had been run by the brutal military. Since then, he had been a bodyguard for Middle Eastern billionaire businessmen and sultans and was a hard man of legendary reputation.

Senturk led him in through a door into the back. The rest of the building was a rotten, dusty dump, but back here, it had been transformed into a posh loft. It was the size of an indoor basketball court, with fabric wallpaper and million-dollar lighting and massive modern paintings on the walls.

Ahmed Dzurdzuk, the young man Mr. Beckett had come to see, was sitting behind an impressive, shining chrome desk that looked like it had been made out of a World War II airplane wing. Dzurdzuk didn’t bother looking up from whatever he was doing on his iMac as Mr. Beckett sat in the midcentury modern chair in front of the desk.

Mr. Beckett sighed silently at this disrespect. These kids today. He’d been doing business with the psychopathic Chechen crook for the last year. The least he could do was acknowledge Mr. Beckett’s existence, but alas, no.

Many people were afraid of the twenty-five-year-old, but Mr. Beckett — not only an experienced connoisseur of dangerous people but also a dangerous person himself — did not fall into that category.

Senturk was a problem, without question, but Ahmed was sloppy, often high, and always distracted.

He could, to borrow an expression from an American book he had once read, swallow the slight, girlish fop with a glass of water.

“Ahmed? Yoo-hoo,” Mr. Beckett finally said after a long two minutes.

“Well, my friend, what brings you by for a face-to-face? You miss me? Ha-ha... of course you do. We still have some of that beautiful new Ecstasy from Denmark. Plenty of it. All you want,” Ahmed said.

Mr. Beckett glanced to his left at Senturk standing back by the inside of the interior door, just out of earshot. Good. He slowly crossed a leg as he leaned back in his chair.

“The Ecstasy was excellent, but I don’t need that. I need what we spoke of on the phone, Ahmed. Remember that item I ordered about three months ago?”

“Come, now,” Ahmed said, frowning. “Please, I told you that that fell through, remember?”

“I remember, Ahmed. I don’t mind if you want to negotiate, but I’m in a hurry, so you win. I’ll double your fee.”

“You don’t understand. It was seized,” Ahmed said as he took a rolled joint out of a cigarette box on his table and lit it with a match.

He tossed the burned match into a filthy crystal ashtray and shrugged.

“That’s the risk,” he said, blowing ganja smoke up at the twenty-foot-high ceiling.

“I know all about risk,” Mr. Beckett said. “I also know that one of your cousins who does your smuggling for you came in on a Nigerian freighter out of the Canary Islands last week. He had a large bag with him when he jumped ship off the coast of Coney Island. It was filled with twenty-seven pounds of C-four plastic explosive. You have it here. Now trot it out, and let’s do business.”

“How do you know this?” Ahmed said in surprise, putting the joint down. “Scratch that. I don’t care. That wasn’t your shipment. That was for another client. I can’t help you. Honestly. You need to be going now. I have some girls coming over.”

“You don’t seem to understand,” said Mr. Beckett calmly as he reached over and took a long puff on Ahmed’s joint. “Here’s what you’re going to do now. You’re going to tell your other client that his shipment was seized, and then you’re going to sell his product to me. Simple, okay? Now get off your ass and go get me what I want like a good little boy.”

Chapter 49

Ahmed sat up in his chair, a dark look on his face, a deeper darkness in his eyes.

“Senturk, can you believe the balls on this fat bastard? No one talks to me like that. Throw this asshole down the stairs. Hard.”

“My apologies,” said Mr. Beckett in fluent Chechen, smiling. “We’ve gotten off on the wrong foot. I know the friends you ordered the plastic for. We have the same friends. We are all on the same side here, Ahmed. Don’t you see? I’m the one who bombed the subway and killed the mayor and set off the EMP. That was me.”

The young punk’s jaw dropped.

“You?” said Ahmed in dismay.

Mr. Beckett nodded.

“Yours truly,” he said. “And the plastic is needed to continue our campaign. We are on the same righteous path.”

The kid thought about it. You had to give him that. He sat nodding to himself. He wasn’t that dumb. Then he shook his head.

Mr. Beckett was up and rolling over the desk faster than the kid could kick out from behind it. They went to the floor in a heap. When they stood, Mr. Beckett had the punk by his curly hair and the ceramic knife he’d hidden in his belt to the kid’s throat.

“I’ll cut him!” Mr. Beckett exploded at the bodyguard, who had his gun out and trained. “I’ll open his carotid artery and write my name on this wall in his spraying blood! Get me my explosives now!”

“You’ve made a mistake,” the evil little Chechen hissed. “Cut my throat and Senturk will blow your fat head off and cut off your balls. You don’t know who you’re fucking with.”

“That makes two of us, I guess,” Mr. Beckett said as he finally saw what he’d been waiting for.

It was a refreshing sight, all right.

Mr. Joyce, having picked the locks of the building and apartment doors, stood silently behind Senturk with a suppressed Mossberg 500 in his hand.

Mr. Beckett dove to the floor behind the desk with Ahmed again as the shooting started. The report of the suppressed shotgun was almost musical, like a cymbal shaken in a blanket. Mr. Beckett stuck his head back up after four clangs and smiled.

Senturk, the giant, now looked like a pile of bloody laundry dumped on the floor.

“Where is it? You have it here. We know you never leave here. Where the fuck is it, you little twerp?” said Mr. Joyce, putting the hot metal barrel of the shotgun to Ahmed’s forehead.

“Screw you maniacs. I am willing to be martyred!” said Ahmed as he tried lamely to push off Mr. Beckett’s iron grip.

“I thought you might say something like that,” said Mr. Joyce as he shrugged off the backpack he was wearing. He took something bulky out of it and clunked it onto the desk.

“Let us test your faith, shall we?” Mr. Joyce said as he plugged in the home-kitchen meat-slicing machine they’d just bought from Bed Bath & Beyond.

Ahmed pissed himself as Mr. Beckett chocked his hand into the meat holder, inches from the spinning, shining stainless steel circular blade.

“It’s in the bedroom closet!” said Ahmed, weeping. “Please! In the upstairs closet — I swear!”

“What a pigsty, Ahmed. Didn’t your mommy ever teach you how to make your bed?” Mr. Joyce said after he came down from the bedroom with the duffel bag full of explosives a minute later.

“Please, I can help. I have money. Millions in cash. You know that. I want to help you!” Ahmed said as he dropped out of Mr. Beckett’s grip onto his knees.

“You want to help?” Mr. Joyce said.

“Yes, of course. Please,” Ahmed said, still weeping.

“Then don’t move an inch,” Mr. Joyce said, and he raised the shotgun one-handed and shot Ahmed point-blank in the face.

Chapter 50

Under normal circumstances, Peter Luger Steak House, an old redbrick Brooklyn landmark, would have been a sight for sore eyes.

But nothing is even close to normal, I thought as I pulled into the parking lot across from its famous brown awning.

Emily and I weren’t there to chow down on some USDA Prime but to meet up with Chief Fabretti. They’d put the mayor in the ground at Queens’s Calvary Cemetery this morning, and a lot of brass and pols had gathered with the mayor’s family at his favorite restaurant after the service.

Still too busy scouring through everything we’d found at al Gharsi’s to attend the service, Emily and I had watched snatches of it broadcast live on TV. Several thousand people had attended, including the vice president.

Watching Mayor Doucette’s bright American flag — draped coffin being brought through the cemetery gates on a horse-drawn carriage, I couldn’t stop shaking my head.

I also couldn’t stop thinking about the rousing speech he’d given right before he’d been shot and how he’d bravely insisted on holding the speech outside to help the city heal. Though the sun was shining, it was one very dark day for the city.

I spotted Fabretti straight off inside the door at the end of the three-deep bar talking to a white-shirted female cop who split as we stepped up.

“Mike, Emily — thanks for meeting here on short notice. Drink?” Fabretti said over the crowd hum.

Fabretti tipped his glass at us ceremoniously after the bartender brought us a couple of ice-cold Stellas.

“First, I want to congratulate you guys on a job well done. I knew you wouldn’t disappoint me, Mike.”

Emily and I looked at each other.

“I can’t tell you what a relief it’s been to tell those press jackals that we finally have someone in custody,” Fabretti continued as he patted me on the shoulder.

“Whoa, boss,” I said, shaking my head. “I don’t know who you’ve been talking to, but this thing ain’t over.”

“What do you mean? You bagged al Gharsi last night, right? He hasn’t escaped, has he?”

“No. Al Gharsi is involved. He obviously knows something about the PayPal thing, but he’s not behind it,” said Emily.

“This guy isn’t it?” Fabretti said. “He runs a frickin’ terrorist training camp! This guy’s affiliated with al Qaeda.”

“All that is true, but the level of sophistication of the attacks implies a lot of money and massive technical expertise. A deep thinker with deep pockets. That doesn’t exactly describe al Gharsi.”

“Emily’s right,” I said, “especially about the deep pockets. I’d say al Gharsi was on a shoestring budget, except his kids didn’t even seem to have any shoes.”

“Precisely. The whole place stinks of poverty and desperation,” Emily said. “I think al Gharsi was used. Like the NYU students. He was a patsy, a cutout.”

“What about his pocket litter? You know, his computers and cell-phone records. What have you found?” said Fabretti hopefully.

“Nothing conclusive and nothing new,” Emily said. “We’re not back to square one, but we’re close to it.”

“Shit,” he said, staring a glum hole through the bottles at the back of the bar.

Of course he was upset. Careers had been smashed to pieces over far lesser cases than this. But it wasn’t just that, I thought as I remembered Fabretti with his dog in his house — a meeting that felt like it took place a billion years ago. He lived here, too. This was killing him. Killing all of us. The city hadn’t been this psychologically screwed up since 9/11.

“We need to find these people,” Fabretti said.

I nodded as I stared over the crowded bar into the restaurant. The Tudor beams and dark paneling. The busy waiters in their old-fashioned white shirts and aprons and black bow ties. Looking at them, I thought of all the millions of busy people in the city trying to keep the wheels on, trying to do right, to support and protect their families.

But nothing was safe. Not anymore.